er ignore the new inventions
that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a
means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of
the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the
same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is
reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he
would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic,
not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of
witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the
elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the
ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to
depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and
under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.

But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has
smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the
mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby
beyond the life of each generation. The mental sloth in which the
Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation
did not become a heritable defect. But apart from the question of the
possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact
that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised
African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the
civilised European in his different surroundings. That these problems
are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the
problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a
difference of content, not of difficulty. The mental strain involved in
leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the
whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in
maintaining his civilised existence. In the all-surrounding air of
superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his
being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,--and
very deep cunning it sometimes is,--so deep, indeed, that the
intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious
ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation,
prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and
intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning
of the primitive